Vital: Swing-state head-to-head polls

Suppose you're a liberal Democrat (like me) who would clearly prefer Warren or Sanders to Joe Biden as President. But you want to make sure a Democrat wins.

So the main dilemma for the Democratic primary voters is: Do you want a very liberal candidate who can fire up the base (think Elizabeth Warren) or do you want a middle-of-the-road comfortable candidate (think Joe Biden)?

Below is exactly the sort of information that plays into that calculus:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/upshot/trump-biden-warren-polls.html

In case that story is behind a paywall for you, I put the basic facts at the end of this post.

You ask voters in the swing states how they would vote given head-to-head matchups of Trump vs Biden and Trump vs Warren.

The fact that the polls are so close is actually very disheartening. It means that an awful lot of people don't really understand or care that our entire system of constitutional government is under attack. But I guess we knew that.

But the polls suggest that Biden would beat Trump, Sanders would beat Trump but not by so much, but Trump would beat Warren. The 7 percent or so of people who aren't already strongly committed Republicans on the one hand or Democrats on the other don't like Warren but are open to Biden.

Now, of course this is just one poll, subject to its own biases. It is taken a year before the election. It doesn't say anything about turnout. But it is the basic sort of reason to prefer Biden to Warren.

But overall turnout is not what's important. I fear that if lots and lots of people in blue states are inspired by Warren and come out in huge numbers on election day -- that makes no difference. What crucially matters is who comes out to vote in the swing states. Warren might fire up the Democratic base there, but opposition to her might fire up the Republican base.

It is very frustrating to liberals to see how conservative the country has been running, especially as they (liberals) are in the majority. It's tempting to see Warren (or Sanders) as a liberal breath of fresh air -- finally lots of good ideas. Get money out of politics, make taxation progressive again, lots of liberal programs, etc. She has the programs I like. If I knew she would be elected and be a dictator until the next election, I would be all in favor. I like her better in just about every way. But the truth is a great deal of her program won't get implemented even if the Democrats win the Senate. If they don't, very little indeed will get implemented -- it would be just what can be done with executive orders. And then, a possibility of enormous weight: if she doesn't win, it doesn't matter how great her program is.

So I am reminded of the part in "Fiddler on the Roof" where the Jewish residents of the village are being forced to leave (https://www.quotes.net/mquote/31618):

A villager asks, "Rabbi, we've been waiting for the Messiah all our lives. Wouldn't now be a good time for him to come?". And the rabbi replies: "I guess we'll have to wait someplace else."

It's high time for liberals to hold the reins of power, but it can't be done yet. It will take patience. Winning the Presidency is a way to stem the tide of assault on the constitutional system. That is more important than anything else. So I will have my eyes firmly on polls that address the exact question these polls asked, and expect my vote to be governed by what they say when it's time for me to vote.

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How Trump fares among registered voters. [The three numbers under each state are who wins against Biden (first line), Sanders (second line) or Warren (third line).]

Trump vs. Biden, Sanders, and Warren

Michigan (n=501)

Even

Sanders +2

Trump +6

Pennsylvania (661)

Biden +3

Sanders +1

Even

Wisconsin (651)

Biden +3

Sanders +2

Even

Florida (650)

Biden +2

Trump +1

Trump +4

Arizona (652)

Biden +5

Trump +1

Warren +2

North Carolina (651)

Trump +2

Trump +3

Trump +3

Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of 3,766 registered voters from Oct. 13 to Oct. 26.

The grave threat of Donald Trump

The Jewish Passover song "Dayenu" is a whole list of many great things God has done. The word "dayenu" means roughly "It would have been enough". It would have been enough if he had brought us out of Egypt, it would have been enough if he had slain their first-born, it would have been enough if he had parted the waters for us. But he did all those things, and all together he is even more worthy of worship and praise.

I am tempted to use the same format in describing my objections to Donald Trump.

It would have been enough if he was a Republican, which in the last several decades implies a strong conservatism -- notably a sense that a social safety net is a bad thing, and that the government can't possibly be the solution to any problem. While he tossed out a few populist ideas on the campaign trail, in office he has stayed strictly with the Republican agenda.

It would have been enough that he is an unashamed pussy-grabber. It would have been enough that he fuels racial hatred. It would have been enough that he attacks all his opponents viciously. It would have been enough that he lies blatantly and repeatedly and claims that the mainstream press offers nothing but fake news. It would have been enough that he started a pointless trade war. It would have been enough that he let down the Kurds on some sort of personal whim. I have no doubt forgotten many others. It is a frightening thought that by law he can at his sole discretion order a nuclear attack if that is his whim. The only thing that might prevent this is the refusal of his subordinates to carry out the order.

But all those things pale in significance against his assault on the US form of constitutional government. In the clearest case to date, he believes he can withhold aid from a US ally until they undertake an investigation and claim wrongdoing by his domestic political opponent for his own political gain. He can viciously attack the constitutionally mandated investigation of his possible wrongdoing by the Congress. It seems his obstruction is just beginning.

Trump himself would be nothing if a substantial minority of the country hadn't elected him. He would soon become nothing if a significant part of that same substantial minority abandoned him. The combination of malice and ignorance that motivate ardent Trump supporters in various proportions is frightening. In the long term, we should be able to work on the ignorance, though malice is a harder problem. But in the mean time they are still a minority and one that can be thwarted at the ballot box.

It's hard to exaggerate how much has changed in the last few decades. Certainly in 1980, prior to the Reagan revolution, and for some time after that, a president behaving as Trump is would have been impeached and removed from office by a nearly unanimous vote of the Senate. This appears unlikely now because Republicans refuse to abandon him. To what extent that is due to their own firm convictions and to what extent it is fear of getting "primaried" by Trump supporters really doesn't matter. And that means that these Republican officials too are a serious threat to our constitutional form of government. It is a sobering thought that if Trump goes, others will likely rise to take the same approach to undermining the constitution. They likely will not repeat Trump's ineptitude and impulsiveness, and so they might be even more of a threat.

The Republican party itself has become a threat to the constitution. The solution is to vote this party out of office until such time as the party re-invents with respect for the constitution.

I have always thought such sentiments as, "Don't vote, it only encourages them" and "Politicians are all alike", and "Politicians should be changed frequently, like diapers, and for the same reason" were unhelpful and silly. At this point, I feel they are a deadly threat to our democracy. There is nothing more important than protecting our democratic form of government. Within our system partisan gridlock is frustrating, but we can work for its eventual resolution. Occasionally there is bipartisan consensus and things do get done. Without respect for the constitution, all of that is at risk. There is an aversion to comparing anyone to Hitler, but in one particular respect there is an apt analogy here: Hitler came to power largely through free and fair elections. He was only able to cancel further elections because of widespread support. We all know that didn't end well.

To make the seriousness of my position clear, if Trump's opponent in the fall of 2020 was Mitt Romney, I would strongly support Mitt Romney. If it was a modern incarnation of George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, I would strongly support them. If it was Michael Pence as he was in the summer of 2016, I would support him, though I'm not sure if his defense of Trump since then has corrupted his own support for the constitution. I find the politics of all of those people to be repulsive. But if indeed they support and respect the constitution, I would favor them strongly and work for their election.

Needless to say, I will strongly support his actual Democratic opponent, whoever that might be. My view tends to make "electability" a prime concern. Moderation in many Democratic legislators, if not partisan gridlock, is likely to prevent major policy initiatives being passed anyway, but return to respect for the constitution is an achievable goal.

And in November of 2020, I will consider anyone who stays home because it doesn't matter to be a gravely mistaken and morally bankrupt person. Similarly with anyone who votes Republican except out of ignorance.

A role for the language police

My mother felt that any educated person should understand the fine points of grammar, and that those who failed in that regard showed laziness and lack of education. "Irregardless" was worthy of derision because of the double negative. Tom Paxton got a derisive laugh from the "Marvelous Toy" line that his son "loves it just like me", as it necessarily meant that the boy loved the toy in the same way he loved his father. Knowing the conjugations of "lay/laid/laid" (transitive) and "lie/lay/lain" (intransive) was vital. Growing up in Durham, New Hampshire, the town was a mix of those with more standard US accents and the local New England accent. When my English teacher at parents' night said she tried to make sure her students' use of language was "akkuhrat" and "cahful" my mother thought she was not being provincial -- she was wrong.

Then I was introduced in college to the serious scientific study of language and the distinction between prescriptive linguistics (how people should speak or write) and descriptive linguistics (how people actually speak or write). Prescriptive rules were silly, because language is constantly changing. Black English was the example of choice (not the Boston accent) of how different dialects of English had their own rules that weren't those of standard English -- different, but just as sensible.

Not so many years ago older folks were concerned that young people used "like" so much, putting it in places it never would have belonged in the past. I read a linguistics paper describing the phenomenon, and finding four or five specific functions that the word served in that sort of speech, with specific rules governing where and when it could appear.

At the level of descriptive linguistics, language is full of generalizations that hold for everyone -- they are invisible to us because we all agree on them. Compare,

Although he was tired, Bill kept on walking.

*He kept on walking although Bill was tired.

You can sometimes introduce a pronoun before the word it refers to, but not always. The leading asterisk is the linguist's notation for saying it is ungrammatical. No dialect of English on earth is going to allow the second construction, no grammar book is going to bother to tell you it's not allowed, and no one ever gets it wrong. The second sentence makes sense only if Bill is some other person entirely. This is part of descriptive linguistics, finding generalizations that we humans are simply not aware of.

Enlightened linguistics recognizes that language changes, so that yesterday's hard-and-fast rule is relaxed, and yesterday's convention isn't true any more. I myself have been surprised that things I was raised to believe were completely forbidden are now accepted usage. As this view is more generally accepted, it tends to give rise to "anything goes". As long as people can understand what you mean, who cares if it violates some longstanding rule?

I have a slightly different vision. The language police serve the role of slowing down language change. When they tell people they are using language wrong, they make sure people realize when they say things in a new way that in recent history they didn't. It nudges them back into line with past usage if there isn't some good reason to change it. Sometimes language has to change. New technology is an obvious cause. Other times it isn't clear why language has to change, but it does. There is some underlying force that makes it happen. And when that happens the language police will lose. But in the mean time they push back against whimsical language change.

I'm not an avid language policer myself, but it can of course be done different ways. I might be inclined to say, "You know, until recently that would have been considered wrong" rather than, "What you're saying is bad English!" But I'm still open to the idea that that latter formulation might be serving a useful purpose.

Why some beneficiaries do not like redistribution

In a <recent post> I argued that moral responsibility depended on the concept of free will and consciousness. Actually, the same holds not just for moral responsibility but any kind of responsibility at all.

One issue at the center of US political debate is redistribution. To what extent should we tax the wealthy and those with high incomes in order to provide services for those who are poor?

The classic conservative argument is roughly, "I've worked hard to get where I am and I'm proud of it. Those people who want help are lazy. People who try hard can make it and don't need help." As you might expect, you hear this argument more from people who are wealthier and more successful, but you also hear it from those who don't have much but are proud of what they do have and can see how they would have even less if they hadn't worked hard and been prudent.

The liberal argument is roughly, "Those who are successful have made it partly through their hard work, but they have also made it through the advantages that come from a privileged background, maybe even good genes. Some have literally inherited their wealth, for some luck has played a large role, and some got where they are from illegal and unethical dealings. So it's right that they have more money than other people, but it's also perfectly fine to take some of what they have earned by way of taxes."

So, how much responsibility do we have for how our lives go? If we have no free will, then we aren't responsible at all, but as I have argued no one can really live without the idea that they make choices freely. But even if you allow for free will, science would strongly suggest that factors outside of a person's control have a great deal to do with how well they do in life.

It is apparent to even conservatives that some people are not responsible for their ill fortune, including those born with severe intellectual or physical handicaps. And I believe most will support the idea of helping out such people through government action or private charity.

But a key issue is not just how much control we have over our lives but how much control we want to believe we have. Answer: people want to believe they have control. This is one explanation for why so many poorer Americans vote against their own economic interests. It may not be pleasant to think that they are poor because they haven't worked hard and been prudent. But it might be even more unpleasant to think that they really didn't have much control -- they would still be poor even if they had tried harder. The one reflects poorly on them as individuals, the other undermines their whole idea of humans having control over their destiny. This could also explain why some poor people don't want to tax the wealthy more -- they judge that the wealthy made it through their own choices and should be able to enjoy what they made.

The formulation of the liberal view taken to an extreme is, "From each according to his means, to each according to his needs." It is a truly noble idea. We all work for the benefit of all. The problem comes in practice. Most people value the well-being of their own families more than the society at large. If their level of effort has no effect on how well-off their families are, that is lack of control over what they value, and most of them stop working hard. That is an argument for why we should reward those who succeed far more than the share of their success that is due to their own efforts. Suppose for instance that we say that 90% of a person's success is due to factors beyond their control and 10% to their own efforts. That might suggest taxing 90% of everyone's income and redistributing it according to need. But how people respond to incentives suggests that we should actually let successful people keep far more than 10% -- many times more.

It's also worth reflecting that the idea of government safety net programs is quite a modern invention. It depends on having a considerable degree of wealth in a society. In the US it originated in the 1930s with New Deal programs. Before that, the assumption was that those who couldn't find a way to eke out a living would just die -- which is of course the way the entire natural world operates. Safety nets may be a recent invention, but they are a wonderful one.

I favor a considerable degree of economic redistribution -- universal health insurance, subsidized child care, a vastly expanded earned income credit, perhaps a guaranteed basic income, to name a few -- but have sketched out some reasons for why there is resistance to these ideas even among those who would benefit from them.

Now it is time for impeachment

I argued against Trump impeachment in <this post>. The Ukraine allegations have shifted the balance, and of course I am far from alone in reaching that conclusion. I find myself in agreement with most of the articles and "friendly" op-eds in the New York Times. I don't think I have much to add beyond what they say, which makes it tempting to skip this blog post. But I'll make it anyway.

I argued before that if you can't get a conviction, it's best not to impeach. But the Ukraine case changes things. Trump is using the power of his office with foreign governments to help get him reelected in 2020, and that undermines our democracy going forward, not just in retrospect.

I can't say I'm newly outraged. My outrage meter has been pegged to the top of the gauge for a long time now. Reasons to be outraged about Trump are layered one on top of the other... there are many layers. Instead of feeling outraged, I'm rather hoping this is an opportunity to get rid of Trump and Trumpism more effectively in the 2020 election -- and perhaps to constrain his behavior between now and then.

A big part of the problem is that the crucial constituency here are those ardent pro-Trump voters who vote in disproportionate numbers in Senate primary contests. Republican senators are very wary of provoking their ire. So the politics centers heavily on what those pro-Trump voters think.

What do they really think? What would it take for some significant portion of them to abandon Trump? I don't really know.

When Trump was elected, I worried that he might simply order the military to arrest Congress. The leftists and centrists would be outraged, but would it be enough? Would Trump voters have just cheered him on as President For Life? There are of course ways to subvert democracy without arresting Congress, and Trump has already used some of those methods (as in withholding a contract from Amazon because of Jeff Bezos's politics), but the subtlety might well be lost on Trump voters.

The readiness with which Trump and allies (including notably Fox News) will lie and obfuscate is concerning. A look at the Fox page shows their guns are blazing as never before. Earlier today there was an "Aha!" story claiming Schiff did the same thing as Trump. Why? Because some prankster claiming to be from Ukraine with dirt on Trump called him a couple years ago and he said he would be interested in that information. There is just no parallel. When someone offers information to someone in the intelligence community, they naturally take it. Whether they find it credible when they get it and what they would do with it are separate questions, but accepting the information is not a problem.

There are three key parties on the Republican side of this issue. First, Trump is a strange, despicable human being. Second, there are Trump voters, and I don't know what makes them tick. They might just be very ignorant, and think there's nothing more important at stake than how it feels good when Trump zings people they don't like. There are people (and not just right-wingers) who think "Don't vote, it just encourages them" is a funny bumper sticker. Third, there are the Republican senators. I'm convinced they aren't ignorant and they know enough history to understand the danger of tyranny. You imagine most of them would personally prefer a Pence presidency to a Trump presidency, if their voters would let them get away with it. And now it's time for them to look in the mirror. On the one side, democracy itself is at stake. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance and the spotlight is now on them. On the other side, their jobs might be at risk if they can't sell an anti-Trump position. Lots of us face job insecurity, and risk losing our jobs if we do the right thing. We can sympathize with people who don't do the right thing if losing the job means financial ruin. But ex-senators do not face financial ruin.

Positive things could happen without Trump actually being removed from office. If Republican senators privately tell him that they will vote against him if he goes too far, it could moderate his behavior without the senators having to pay the political price.

If we assume that Trump is defeated in 2020, the picture still does not look very good unless the Democrats retake the Senate. We face ongoing gridlock in this highly polarized era unless Senate, House, and President are all from the same party. I suppose Republican senators might worry about losing to a Democrat in the final election, as well as worrying about losing to a Trump supporter in the primary. I don't have strong intuitions about how the impeachment process will play out in terms of the Senate count. If tribalism continues, Republican-leaning states will continue to elect Republican senators.

But far more is at stake here than partisan politics. Much as I dislike Pence's politics, I do not have any reason to think he is inclined to disrupt international relations and the integrity of the political process. I just hope there is not some other demagogue ready to take Trump's place if he goes.

The linkage of free will, consciousness, and morality

The scientific worldview has been dramatically successful in explaining how things work and letting us build technology to vastly improve our lives. The one mystery it has no idea how to explain is consciousness -- the fact that we all feel a "seemingness" to life.

Science also holds that free will is impossible -- the idea that there is a "self" that makes decisions for reasons other than a causal interplay of physical processes. As I see it, consciousness is essential to our concept of free will. If we are unaware of having alternatives and choosing one of them, then we did not exercise our will. On the other hand, consider a very sophisticated computer program. We can point to inputs from the program's environment, which could include truly random inputs like radioactive decay, interwoven with an extremely complicated series of computations. Despite all the complexity, we still wouldn't say that the computer had free will.

Science also has nothing to say about the idea of values -- what's worthwhile or what's not. It is only one aspect of the human mind and brain. You could build into a program some abstract notions like, "complexity is better than simplicity", and derive from that the desirability of preserving complex ecosystems and preferring complex civilizations to simple ones. Most of morality concerns the experiences of beings that we assume to be conscious and experiencing the world the same we do in the relevant respects (more on that below). But essential to the very idea of morality is choice -- free will. If something happened that was beyond our control, we cannot be said to have moral responsibility for it.

Moral responsibility as we humans think of it requires free will. Free will requires consciousness. All three are fundamentally foreign to the scientific method and central to our conscious experience, and all seem foreign to science and inherent to our lived experience in exactly the same way.

The requirements do not run in the opposite direction. We can imagine conscious experience without free will -- we can imagine having no control over what we think about. It does however sound very alien to our own experience -- even if we were completely deprived of sensory input or the ability to influence the outside world in any way, we could still decide what to think about. We can also easily imagine free will without morality -- we can choose our actions based on anything at all. But moral responsibility requires the other two.

As a footnote, most of morality concerns the experiences of beings that we assume to be conscious. At the heart of reducing animal suffering is the idea that animals are conscious and experience suffering -- if they don't, then there is no obstacle to doing things to them that we would hate. When we hear them cry or whimper, our concern is that they are feeling the way we feel when we cry or whimper. On the other hand, if someone builds a very sophisticated robot that emulates an animal, then we congratulate the builder if it cries or whimpers when an animal would, but we don't think the robot is suffering. To the extent we feel some sympathy for HAL as Dave disassembles him in "2001: A Space Odyssey", it is because we assume HAL is truly conscious, as when he says "I can feel it". When it comes to human beings, we have a very elaborate sense of moral and immoral ways to treat each other, based primarily on assuming their conscious experience is just like ours. The common assumption that others experience the world as we do and that this guides our moral action is interesting, but not part of the main thrust of my argument.

Online privacy and targeted advertising

I have heard all the dire warnings about how corporations are gobbling up my personal information and know far more about me than I would like. I suppose it's true. I will sometimes go to the privacy settings for Facebook or Google or some other place and set them to be more restrictive. But then within a year or two they change it and I have to go back in and do it again, some different way. A person gets tired. I don't read privacy policies any more closely than I read user agreements when they install software. Does anyone? I could disable cookies, but cookies are actually very convenient in customizing my personal experience.

One reason I'm not upset enough to take vigorous action is that the reason they are doing this (as far as we know) is to more precisely target the advertising they give me to be more relevant. Well, if I have to look at advertising, surely it's better the more likely it is to be relevant. Studies show that people are susceptible to various devious tricks and are being manipulated by all advertising. But I figure that's my problem. (On those rare occasions I watch TV, I deliberately get up and do something else when the ads come on). I don't know how anyone could legislate the removal of subtle manipulation in advertising. Perhaps I should be upset because this same data could be used for more intrusive purposes if it got into the wrong hands. I guess I'm just not in practice taking that possibility all that seriously.

Four years ago I experienced the ultimate in targeted advertising. I was looking for a new small car, focusing on the Toyota Yaris and Honda Fit. I used Google search. As a result, I started getting advertising related to cars, and it continued after I had bought my Yaris. One picture showed me not just a Yaris, and not just one of the same color (blue) -- it was a picture of the actual car I had bought, which I could identify by the background of the photo showing the lot where I had first seen it. The advertising certainly was precisely targeted!